Gilgit-Baltistan is the only region fighting to integrate

A village called Yaseen, and a father who refused to set a ceiling

The episode opens with Muzamil noting that he has hosted athletes from Gilgit-Baltistan before — the region is, as he puts it, notorious for producing world-class athletes — but never someone from Yasir Abbas’s line of work. Yasir is coordinator to the Chief Minister of Gilgit-Baltistan, a Chevening scholar, and trained in both international relations and law.

What Muzamil keeps returning to in the first half of the conversation is the distance Yasir has travelled. Not the geographic distance from a village to Whitehall, but the social one. Yasir was born and raised in Yaseen, a village roughly 150 kilometres further north of Gilgit city. He did his primary schooling there until the eighth grade. Roads were a problem. Basic infrastructure was missing. Health options were thin, education options were thinner, and winters were genuinely hostile. Every student carried a piece of wood to school in winter so the classrooms could be heated. “Everybody has a sense of community,” Yasir says of that arrangement. “I have to put in my work there as well.”

He credits two things for everything that came after. The first is the village itself, which taught him persistence and the simple fact that different lives sit at different facets of the same country. The second is his father, who retired from the army as a non-commissioned officer, then pursued his own education and ended up in the judiciary. “He was someone who gave me this initial vision that there is more to life than just these mountains,” Yasir says. The family was not wealthy, but it was, by village standards, privileged in the way that mattered: there was a household assumption that higher education existed and was worth working toward, even if no one in the family yet knew what a university was.

Muzamil names Yasir more than once in this opening — partly out of warmth, partly because the trajectory deserves the emphasis. A boy from Yaseen who ends up sitting with the late former US Secretary of State George Shultz at Stanford is not a story Pakistanis hear often enough.

Gilgit city, and the sudden discovery of sect

The move from Yaseen to Gilgit city for high school is the first inflection point. Until then, Yasir had no idea that Islam had sects within it. Gilgit changed that immediately. “When I came to Gilgit, mujhe andaaza ho gaya — Sunni koi cheez hai, Ismaili koi cheez hai, Shia koi cheez hai,” he says, “and then the discord, and then your raw understanding of your own faith and the other faiths.”

He is unusually honest about what that period did to him. “If I look back, I think that at one point, if I measure myself against today, I was probably an extremist,” he says. “I was holding on to a few biases of my own.” He arrived in the city in the middle of a wave of sectarian tension that impacted schooling and worldview alike. The point Yasir makes is not that Gilgit corrupted him, but that the cleanliness of village life had insulated him from sect as a category at all. The discord is something the city teaches you.

Bahria, the library upstairs, and the third semester that changed everything

Yasir did not know what he wanted to study. He was not good at maths, chemistry, or biology, which closed off the three default tracks of medicine, engineering, and the forces — the last of which was already closed by a serious knee injury. What he had instead was a habit, formed with his father, of listening to Voice of America on the radio. They had no television. The Iraq war and the Afghanistan war were both at their peaks. Current affairs caught him before any subject did.

He applied to one university — Bahria — for international relations, mostly on a senior’s word of mouth and the limitations of internet access in Gilgit. He arrived in shalwar kameez and was told by the proctor he could not dress like that. He greeted a female classmate’s “Hi, Yasir” with “Assalamu alaikum.” His English was not at the level of classmates from Beaconhouse or LGS. His grades for the first two semesters were terrible. He called his father and said he was stuck.

The third semester is where the conversation tightens. Yasir went upstairs in the Bahria library and discovered the magazine rack: The Economist, Time, the Financial Times. “I started reading,” he says. “And I think that was my game-changing moment. I read basically everything.” His written English improved. His spoken English improved. He went from being a basic member of the debating society to being its president by the sixth semester. Muzamil, who has been listening closely, lets the moment land without smoothing it over. The library is not a metaphor here. It is the actual lever.

Mushahid, Sherry Rehman, and the Youth Parliament

Yasir interned with Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed on Pak-China relations in the period just before CPEC was publicly announced — the groundwork stage, as he puts it. He then worked at the Jinnah Institute under Sherry Rehman, profiling Afghan candidates in the run-up to Ashraf Ghani’s first presidential contest. After graduating in 2014, he was selected for the Youth Parliament of Pakistan run by PILDAT in collaboration with the Danish embassy — sixty members from across the country, structured as a replica of the National Assembly, with thematic sessions producing real policy resolutions. Yasir was elected youth foreign minister.

The Emerging Leaders of Pakistan fellowship took him to the United States, where the visits to the Pentagon, the White House, the State Department, and Stanford forced him to re-frame his worldview a third time. “I was trying to link up my village experience of village understanding of politics to the local understanding of politics and then international understanding of foreign relations,” he says.

Stanford, déjà vu, and the FSC notebook

The most personal moment in the conversation comes when Muzamil asks what it felt like, on a human level, to keep moving — village to Gilgit, Gilgit to Islamabad, Islamabad to Washington and then to the UK. Yasir’s answer goes back to a single moment in his high school computer lab. He had heard a Voice of America segment in which a Stanford professor was interviewed about Afghanistan. He wrote down the word “Stanford,” went to school the next day, and Googled it. He did not know how to browse properly. He noted that it was a university and that people studied there.

Years later, in his FSC, he told his father — in Urdu — that he was going to America. His father said yes, but the laughter underneath the agreement was sarcastic. When Yasir eventually walked through Stanford as a fellow and sat with George Shultz, he had the strange sense that he had already been there. “It was like I have already been over there,” he says. “Kind of a déjà vu moment. In my high school when I Googled this word Stanford, I already started to live that.”

Muzamil draws the lesson out cleanly. A lot of more privileged people would have given themselves the excuse that this kind of thing is for someone else — Islamabad people, or the rich, or A-level students. Yasir refused the excuse. “I need to fight back. I need to basically make a space for myself, because no one is going to give me opportunities on a plate.”

Chevening, Sussex, and human rights as a method

Yasir pursued an LLB through an affiliate college in Gilgit linked to the University of Peshawar — three years, on top of a full-time job — specifically so he could apply for a Master’s in international law abroad. The first CSS attempt failed on the English essay paper, which he is candid about: it was a half-hearted attempt and he paid the price.

Chevening came next. He was intimidated by the calibre of past awardees but applied anyway. At Sussex, he did an LLM in international human rights law, with a focus on war and terror and the foundational approaches to international law. The law clinic module had him advising the then UN Special Rapporteur on Iran directly; his policy input made the final report. He went on to work as a legal consultant with the NHS in the Black Country, and led a comparative research project on migrant youth identity across the UK, Toronto, and Deakin in Australia.

He returned to Pakistan in January 2020, just before Covid hit. He joined the Research Society of International Law and taught at the National Defence University in Islamabad. Then the appointment as coordinator to the CM of Gilgit-Baltistan came through.

The status question, and why the old objection has collapsed

Halfway through the conversation, Muzamil pivots to the policy question that gives the episode its hook: where does Gilgit-Baltistan’s provincial status actually stand?

Yasir sets the history out compactly. The region was historically referred to as the Northern Areas and was treated as part of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute — which meant a plebiscite that never happened and a series of ad-hoc governance mechanisms, including the FCR, a council structure, and a chief executive arrangement. The 2009 Gilgit-Baltistan Empowerment Package gave the region a chief minister and a governor for the first time, so it began to look like a province. But Article 1 of the Constitution of Pakistan, which defines the territories of the federation, still does not recognise it as one.

He then states the line that gives the episode its title. “GB is the only region which wants to integrate in Pakistan,” he says. “It is the only place in the world which is struggling to integrate in a country.” Most contested regions, in Pakistan and elsewhere, want out. GB wants in.

The historical reluctance to grant the status, Yasir argues, came from an elite calculation — political, military, judicial — that integrating Gilgit-Baltistan would weaken Pakistan’s Kashmir position in international forums. He disagrees with that reasoning, both as a student of law and as a student of political science: granting GB its rights does not weaken the federation, it strengthens it.

What he reports as new is that this rationale has now collapsed inside the federal government. “If you were to ask me this question last year, I would have said maybe a decade,” he tells Muzamil. “But now I am privy to a lot of negotiations, a lot of government engagements with the federal government. I would say it’s a matter of months. It’s a matter of a year.” The remaining disagreement is on modalities — whether to attach a conditional clause, whether to introduce a new article, what shape the integration takes — not on whether to do it.

The elitist debate, and what ordinary people actually want

Yasir is careful not to inflate the political identity question. Provincial status, he says, is largely an elitist debate inside Gilgit-Baltistan. It matters to people with political interests and a political understanding. Ordinary residents focus on something else entirely: the cost of wheat, the subsidies that keep daily life affordable, the basic differential between what a card or a registered vehicle costs in GB versus what FBR would charge to regularise it elsewhere. “I don’t think the people of Gilgit-Baltistan are ready for it,” he says, of paying mainland prices on essentials.

But he is also clear that the absence of provincial status has real policy and financial costs. Without representation in the Senate and National Assembly, the region negotiates at a structural disadvantage on every fiscal question. Muzamil presses the economic case: tourism, minerals, stone, and CPEC-linked logistics should, over time, generate enough indigenous wealth to offset the loss of subsidies. Yasir agrees in principle, and adds the constraints honestly. Industry has stayed away from GB historically because of distance, regulatory friction, and power shortages. The region has not had its own indigenous market.

CPEC, Skardu, and the alternate corridor

Gilgit-Baltistan, Yasir reminds Muzamil, is the mouth of CPEC — the connectivity point through which the China-Pakistan economic relationship physically passes. That gives the region enormous potential and an equally serious obligation to develop carefully.

He flags the tourism trap directly. Hunza is already mushrooming with concrete. Muzamil mentions a 2017 honeymoon trip on which he and his wife encountered three landslides in a single rainy night between Naran and Gilgit, with rocks the size of the studio table blocking the road. The land deserves better than that. Yasir is unequivocal: GB needs an eco-friendly, environmentally sensitive, locally driven tourism industry, or it ends up with another Murree. The events Muzamil and Yasir are recording in the week of — referring to the Murree tragedy of January 2022 — sit silently behind the conversation.

Yasir confirms that the incumbent GB government, under the current Chief Minister, is working on building an indigenous revenue base — a local revenue authority — to reduce federal dependence. He frames this in international-law language: in the twenty-first century, the right of self-determination has evolved into a more practical right of self-administration. Autonomy over revenue is what makes region-sensitive policy possible at all.

He also previews the infrastructure pipeline. Skardu now has an all-weather international airport. The Skardu-Gilgit road has compressed an eight-to-ten-hour journey to two and a half to three hours. An alternate corridor to CPEC is planned that will route from Gilgit through Ghizer and Phander to Chitral and into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, providing a second connectivity option for parts of the region that have no road access today. Flight frequency from Islamabad has tripled in places, and a future route via Astore could bring Islamabad-to-Gilgit travel down to six to eight hours.

Where the conversation lands

By the end of the discussion, what Yasir Abbas has done is sketch a regional case that holds together at three altitudes at once. At the personal altitude, a village childhood is not a sentence; it is a starting point that requires persistence and a parent willing to point past the mountains. At the policy altitude, Gilgit-Baltistan’s constitutional anomaly is finally on the table for serious resolution — not because the underlying argument has changed, but because the old objection no longer holds. And at the economic altitude, the region’s path runs through indigenous revenue, planned tourism, and the second CPEC corridor, not through subsidy dependence.

Muzamil, throughout, lets Yasir hold the floor. The questions he asks are the ones a careful listener would ask: what was the village like, who paid for the journey, what changed in the third semester, what is the timeline, and what do ordinary people actually want. The answers are specific. None of them are hype. That is the register the conversation closes in.